Thousands protest proposed security laws

Mothers holding their children's hands stood in the sprinkling rain, holding up antiwar placards, while students chanted slogans against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his defence policies to the beat of a drum.

Mothers holding their children’s hands stood in the sprinkling rain, holding up antiwar placards, while students chanted slogans against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his defence policies to the beat of a drum.

Japan is seeing new faces join the ranks of protesters typically made up of labour union members and greying leftist activists. On Sunday, tens of thousands filled the streets outside Tokyo’s parliament to rally against new security legislation likely to become law in September.

“No to war legislation!” “Scrap the bills now!” and “Abe, quit!” they chanted in one of the summer’s biggest protests. Their cries are against a series of bills that would expand Japan’s military role under a reinterpretation of the country’s warrenouncing constitution.

In Japan, where people generally don’t express political views in public, such rallies have largely diminished since the often violent university student protests in the early 1960s. Anti-nuclear protests after the 2011 Fukushima disaster also petered out.

Smaller protests were held elsewhere across the nation Sunday. The demonstrations started earlier this year but grew sharply after July, when Abe’s ruling party and its junior coalition partner pushed the legislation through the more powerful lower house despite vocal opposition from other parties – and media polls showing the majority of Japanese opposed the bills.

Whether the protests’ momentum signals wider social change remains to be seen. They could die out once the summer holiday is over and the legislation is passed, as is widely expected.

But grassroots groups of typically apolitical citizens – aided by social media – appear to be growing.

A group called Mothers Against War started in July and gained supporters rapidly via Facebook. It collected nearly 20,000 signatures of people opposed to the legislation, which representatives tried unsuccessfully to submit to Abe’s office last Friday.

“I’m afraid the legislation is really going to reverse the direction of this country, where pacifism was our pride,” said a 44-year-old architect who joined Sunday’s rally with her five-year-old son. She identified herself only as A. Hashimoto, saying politics is still a sensitive topic among parents at her son’s kindergarten.

“I feel our voices are neglected by the Abe government,” she said.

The bills would permit the Self Defence Force to engage in combat for the first time since the Second World War in cases of “collective defence,” when such Japanese allies as the U.S. are attacked, but Japan itself is not.

The upper house is currently debating the bills, and is expected to approve them sometime next month.

But even if it doesn’t, the legislation will be sent back to the lower house for a second vote that, if passed, would make it law.

Abe’s government argues that the changes are needed for Japan to respond to a harsher security environment, including a more assertive China and growing terrorist threats, and to fulfil expectations that it will contribute more to global peacekeeping efforts.

The bills are based on the Abe Cabinet’s decision to alter the interpretation of Japan’s constitution, drawn up by the occupying U.S. military after the Second World War, and not the constitution itself, which prohibits the country from using force for purposes other than self-defence.

Dozens of legal experts and other academics have questioned the bills’ constitutionality,

saying they go beyond what’s written in the charter.

Etsuko Matsuda, a 40-year-old mother and homemaker from Sendai, in northern Japan, said she has seen too many wrong decisions in her country, including the restart of a nuclear reactor after the Fukushima disaster.

“I think there are a growing number of people like me who realize our (lives) have only turned worse under Abe’s government,” she said. “I hope more people would be interested in politics and speak up.”

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